Even when she was quite far away from us she kept twisting and swishing her hair about and laughing.
‘Stupid cow,’ Carl said, but his eyes were stuck to her. I watched Carl, not Chloe. I noticed every time she wobbled, he flinched.
‘Get out to the middle,’ I said, and Carl took a step closer to the edge and took his hands out of his pockets but he didn’t say anything.
He could have stopped it. Either of them could have stopped it in a second. I wanted her to stop it. I wanted her to weigh up her options and realise that confiding in me about Wilson was her only and her best choice. All she needed to do was come clean and give me this secret she’d been keeping. I was her best friend. I was first. She could have trusted me with anything. All I was doing was encouraging her: I was making telling me an easier, more attractive option than not telling me. She knew she didn’t need to go out on the ice: there wasn’t any pressure. I didn’t push her; I didn’t lay a hand on her.
Chloe started to pick up speed, sliding on flat feet and making rings around the outside of the pond in a tightening spiral to the centre. The far side was in the shade of overhanging trees. When she passed underneath them all I could see of her was flashes of her white hands and trainers weaving through the air, as if disembodied. If it was me out there, I would have fallen. I would have twisted an ankle, or overbalanced and cracked the back of my head against the glassy surface or bruised my backside on a stick.
‘She thinks she’s in a film,’ I said, even though I knew Carl wasn’t listening. He jerked his shoulder and grunted slightly, hardly a response at all, and I was overcome with the urge to turn my back on Chloe. She only did these things when other people were watching. That’s what Emma was for. I wanted to tell Carl that if he was that worried about her, the quickest way to get Chloe off the ice would be for us both to turn around and go back and sit in the car.
Not that I was that desperate to go and sit in the car with Carl on my own either. Chloe could get scared first, then she would talk, then she would come in off the ice and be safe again.
She came nearer, out of the shadow and trying to spin around. The soles of her trainers were snagging on some groove or imperfection on the ice that I couldn’t see, and she was laughing at nothing, and using her left foot like a sweeper, to brush the ice smooth. I looked at her and saw Barbara, pushing the pile of the carpet backwards and forwards with the toe of her slipper, staring at nothing for hours until it went dark and there was nothing to stare at.
‘It’s stones,’ she called, and waved with both hands over her head as if me and Carl were hundreds of miles away. ‘Someone’s been chucking stones. There’s hundreds of them.’
‘Come off now,’ Carl said, but there was a smile in his voice still. He didn’t sound worried anymore, and took another step forward on to the very edge of the ice. His trainers were unlaced and darker at the toes where the blue canvas had been stained by the wet from the grass. I twiddled with the fastening of the Christmas present school coat and stepped forward too.
It was nothing to do with Carl. Chloe always did things first, I’d accepted that, but she accepted that she was testing the way, and that I would follow along shortly after. Carl didn’t have anything to do with it.
‘Where are your boots?’ I said, gently. ‘How come you aren’t wearing your boots?’
Carl looked at me. Didn’t say anything for a long while.
‘I didn’t want them anymore,’ he said, ‘they were dirty.’ I stared at him, and he laughed, ‘So what?’
‘Are you coming?’ Chloe called, and we both paused, me and her boyfriend Carl, one foot on the ice each and waiting. Chloe carried on knocking the stones away with the side of her foot. They were the grey, straight-edged chips – big gravel from the path and the car park. Industrial – it comes in sacks and someone had chucked handfuls of it out onto the ice. Probably someone we knew. Someone in our year at school, at least.
I put my hands either side of my mouth and made a trumpet.
‘Can you see anything yet?’
Carl looked at me when I shouted, and snorted, ‘Is that what we’re here for? Still?’
I ignored him, and shouted again. ‘It’s behind you!’
The oooo sound didn’t echo – we were too much in the open for that – but it sounded hollow anyway, glancing over the ice and amplifying like we were at a pantomime. Chloe looked up and gave me the finger, for no reason at all, and then started stepping, half walking, half sliding, to the centre of the lake.
‘He just ran away,’ said Carl.
‘Chloe said we could come and check. To put my mind at rest. She’s nearly there now.’
‘Waste of fucking time,’ Carl said, and I thought he was getting to something – but I didn’t want it to be him to tell me, didn’t want it to be something he’d break to her: Listen – cocking his head towards me – I’ve had to let her in on it, don’t start on though, will you? No. It was not supposed to be like that.
‘Chloe doesn’t think it’s a waste of time,’ I said, and Carl laughed at me again and might have been about to say something else when Chloe interrupted us.
‘Oi!’ she shouted, sounding indignant. It was because we’d stopped looking at her. ‘I’m here!’ she said. ‘You two better not be talking about me!’
She put her foot on top of the football and Carl stepped forward with his other foot until he was completely on the ice.
So this was the way it was going to be. He was going to follow her out there.
I stepped back onto the bank.
‘Come back in now,’ he said, trying to sound like someone’s dad.
‘It’s stuck right in,’ she said.
‘Can you see through?’ I imagined that out in the middle, where the water was clearer, it would have frozen into something like thick glass.
Chloe stepped back and put her hands on her hips, drew her leg behind her and kicked the football. The ice broke, making a noise like snapped polystyrene. The football bobbed under the surface and popped back out. It rolled across the ice away from her and the leg she’d kicked with sank into the hole it had left.
I suppose she must have screamed.
Carl ran onto the ice as if he were sprinting across tarmac. I thought he might slip, but he didn’t. I put my hands back inside my pockets and felt for my mittens.
He got there quickly. When he reached her, Chloe was sprawled awkwardly across the surface. She’d leaned forward – her right leg buried in the black water up to her thigh and her left bent and flat behind her on the ice. Her arms were stretched out as if she was reaching for the ball which had hit one of the branches and stopped rolling six inches short of her scrabbling fingertips.
Carl grabbed hold of her left ankle. He was crouching behind her and pulling at her. It wasn’t doing any good. He was pulling her backwards, bringing the back of her thigh against the fragment of ice behind it. He would have done better to stand up and hold onto her hands, or try to slide her out frontward. I was watching them and wondering again if broken slabs of ice could cut a person. No, I decided at last, because a body’s heat would melt the edge and dull it.
Carl was shouting something, and Chloe was screaming and flailing and kicking with her free leg. She wasn’t doing herself any good. Panicking so much that Carl had a job keeping hold of her ankle. He stood up, heaved her leg up with him and then leaned back. It must have felt like she was being folded in two. Carl wobbled, as if he was losing his balance. I thought he was going to do it. Then he wobbled again, and I realised it wasn’t him that was moving, it was the piece of ice he was standing on.